DIRECTIONS; Low-Speed Chase On Carousel Of the Mind

By HILARIE M. SHEETS

Published: January 29, 2006

If speed -- the dizzying, liberating, body-hurtling, lose-your-lunch kind of speed -- is the hallmark of the conventional amusement park, are there still thrills if the rides are slowed down, way down in the name of art? That was the premise of Carsten Holler's ''Amusement Park,'' which began operating this month at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass. As it turns out, the installation process itself was a bit of a roller-coaster ride. Like relics from a lost civilization, an enormous Gravitron, bumper cars and three other attractions have been plucked from fairgrounds and moved to a darkened, football-field-size gallery.

The rides creak, moan and flash their lights at the same radically reduced rate that they turn and twitch. Space is distorted, too: like a funhouse mirror, a glass wall reflects the cavernous room in fractured form.Viewers can't go on the rides and of course they wouldn't be any fun at this rate. What Mr. Holler, a 44-year-old German scientist turned artist based in Stockholm, is offering is a different kind of mental trip with hallucinatory effects: did that tilt-a-whirl just jerk or was it a trick of the imagination? ''You have to let go,'' he said, ''like you would let go in your body in a real amusement park, but here it's about letting go in your mind.''

While the artist was on firm ground with the implications of sending viewers languidly through the looking glass, he had no idea how to pull it off. Modifying the contraptions fell to Art Gillette and his brothers, local fairground operators. ''We're trained to always think about faster, louder, brighter, more exciting,'' Mr. Gillette said, adding later, ''This was so simple it was difficult.''

For instance, the brothers grossly overengineered the Gravitron -- they realized there was no need to worry about vibrations or imbalance of people. And in a bumper car, the motor overheats and burns when it runs too slowly. The Gillettes had to scrap the original drive units and remanufacture them to meet the artist's requirement that the rides change direction and degree of slowness every day.

At least one viewer considers the exhibit a success: ''As we were installing and people were walking through, I began to understand what Carsten's doing,'' Art Gillette said. ''You see the reactions these things bring out in people, like, I remember this, but it's not quite what I remember. Was that a dream or maybe this is the dream. It's a strange, fantastic experiment.'' HILARIE M. SHEETS